An Experiment to Measure the Cognitive Weights of Code Control Structures

Various measures of software complexity have been proposed over the years. More recently, cognitive complexity measures of software have been proposed as a complement to other more widely adopted measures that are primarily based on physical size and/or a systematic analysis of code. Many of these cognitive measures consider the notion of cognitive weight to be an integral part of code comprehension and complexity. Previous work has proposed experiments to derive cognitive weight values for code control structures. Unfortunately, there are a number of flaws in these experiments. These flaws in previous works’ experiments need to be addressed by a new experiment if reasonable cognitive weight values for code control structures are to be derived. The experimental design and tool presented in this paper attempt to address some of the problems in previous experiments. Cognitive weight values for code control structures are derived using data gathered from our experiments and are then compared with cognitive weight values from previous works.